The Fokwa research group is interested in novel inorganic solids derived from the combination of main group elements (mainly boron), and metals (mainly transition metals). Much emphasis lies on the elucidation of the crystal and electronic structures as well as structure-bonding-property correlations of such new compounds, thus enabling their potential applications as materials for energy related technologies (magnetic, magnetocaloric, superconducting and spintronic materials) as well as refractory materials (hard and superhard materials). Hence, a variety of solid state synthetic methods as well as state of the art analytical and computational methods (mainly DFT) are commonly applied in a synergistic manner to achieve these goals.